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Most of the motives of life run on sunlight. The filters filter down in the atmosphere and eagerly absorbed by light -running organisms like plants and algae. Through photosynthesis, light particles provide energy for the cell reaction to produce chemical energy (in the form of sugar), then transmitted through the food network in a complicated dance of herbivores, meat -eating animals, garbage people, decomposition, etc.
On a beautiful sunny day, there are many photons to go around. But what happens in weak light? Biologists have long been curious about the light photosynthesis process that can run on the road or how many phrotons need, and how fast, for the photosynthesis machinery of a cell to process carbon dioxide into oxygen and energy. The calculations have suggested a minimum theory about 0.01 micromoles photon per square meter per second, or less than a hundred thousand light of a sunny day.
For decades, this calculation is theoretical, due to the difficulties of photosynthesis research in low light. No one can confirm it in the field, although there are many places on Earth that light is hardly achieved. Each winter in the North extremely high, for example, the sun, obscured by the inclination of the earth, disappeared for months. The meter of the snow covered the sea and blocked the light, leaving the cold ocean underneath the darkness as inside a tomb. There, the biologists pretended, micro -tissue photosynthesis and ice down for the season and waiting for the warmth and light to return.
People think at night because of the desert conditions where there are very little life, and everything is sleeping and hibernating and waiting for the next spring, he said Clara HoppeA biologist at Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. But really, people have never really looked at it.
In the winter of 2020, Hoppe spent months living on a ship falling into a stream of ice, overnight, to study the limits of photosynthesis in the dark. The group's recent research on natural communication has reported micro -tissue Development and reproduction At light or close to the minimum theoretical minimum than before, it is observed in nature.
Research shows that in some coldest, darkest places on Earth, life blooms with the most light quantum. At least some plankton, under some conditions, can do some very useful things in very low light, he said Douglas CampbellA underwater photosynthetic expert at Mount Allison University in Canada, who is not involved in research. “That is an important job.”
The power of the dark face
Traditionally, scientists understood the North Pole as a stagnant place throughout the year. In the winter, organisms can run away from cold water to do so; Those who stay outside live reserve or sink into a silent sleep. Then, when the sun returned, this place returned to life. In the spring blooming, a boom in photosynthesis and other bacteria start the North Pole ecosystem, promote an annual fun, with small crustaceans, fish, seals, birds, polar bears, whales, etc.
It seems that any fleeting plants can start earlier than the competition may have a more successful summer. This made her wonder when, accurate, organisms could react to light again.